


i am tired of being brave

by incompositus



Category: La Reina del Sur (TV), Queen of the South (TV)
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Jeresa, Teresa’s thoughts over the seasons basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 20:10:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15444894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incompositus/pseuds/incompositus
Summary: When Teresa tells him that she doesn’t know who he is, she’s only partly telling the truth. Sometimes she thinks she knows him more than she’s known anyone else.





	i am tired of being brave

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know”

A girl is crying and praying, her rosary clacking against the metal frame of a bed. Rats are skittering somewhere, unseen but made loud in the echoing warehouse.

 

Teresa lies still in her flea-infested cot the night she gets back from her job at the airport. Her throat hurts, bile having burned it raw and soap still leaving it’s acrid taste. She thinks of how her mother used to give her warm tea with honey in it, on nights where she couldn’t sleep with a cold. She thinks of how she told Guero about her mother, and how he had smiled and promised to make her tea until she was an old lady. She has to tamp down the bubble of grief that rises in her.

 

_Can you see me now, Mama? Can you see what the world and it’s terrible men have done to your Teresita?_

 

No one answers, of course.

 

She falls asleep with the the girl’s fervent whispers in her ear.

 

_Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil._

 

——

 

His house is quiet, stylish and clean. The woman he kisses over the couch has a soft southern drawl, and hair that looks softer. She’s never had to fight to survive, thinks Teresa. She remembers a time when she didn’t have to, either, a time where the most important thing in her life was remembering to call Brenda to gossip about one of the new girls a lieutenant was sleeping with.

 

She follows James’ girlfriend upstairs, and when the dress slides over her body like it was made for her, she is angry.

 

The girl who should fit into this dress isn’t here anymore.

 

Later, when James is wrestling with her in the front seat she feels like she’s drowning. Watching Aveline die in front of her hasn’t prepared her for the struggle she can see through the window. Teresa is panicking, and kicking, and clawing at James, but his arms are a vise around her. When the man in the bedroom falls still, James lets her go slowly, and she pushes him away like he’s burned her.

 

She realizes that she has tears in her eyes when he tells her, in his low, measured voice, “This is your world now.”

 

Teresa wonders later how a man like that can kiss his woman so easily. How he can hold that soft, southern girl with blood on his hands.

 

She thinks of Guero, and she hates him a little. She hates him for leaving her alone in a world she doesn’t recognize anymore.

_Did you ever touch me with dirtied hands, my love? Did you know that when a man is being suffocated, his legs kick uselessly at the air?_

 

She hates herself, then, for being so naive. Guero was killed by his own people, by his family. Both of them already know about savages.

 

——

 

She kills the redheaded man from Florida, and her hands shake for days afterwards. In the car, James is quiet, but she can still feel him looking at her. She knows that the man would have killed her first, but she can’t stop the tears from pooling in her eyes, and the feeling of loss carving a hole in her chest.

 

Teresa knows that she has just lost a part of herself that she can’t get back.

 

The woman in white sits in the backseat and stares. Her large, dark sunglasses fail to hide a weight in her eyes that presses down on Teresa’s shoulders.

 

Teresa wonders if the line she crossed today has brought her closer to being that woman.

 

——

**Author's Note:**

> This will basically be a set of drabbles/short thoughts going through the seasons. Follow me at auhrums.tumblr.com so we can yell about these two together!!!


End file.
